WILMINGTON — Per Joan’s husband, Howard:
Joan has long been a special case. A bit short, never had kids (but loved them, especially little ones — the kids reacted to her likewise). She was mentally tougher in younger times than anybody she came up against — including me by a mile. Her tongue, her use of the English language, could be brutally straight forward and she had no idea that it at the least was on the edge of rudeness.
We met at a cocktail party at an international airline meeting in Madrid 49 years back. I said to an English colleague who she had worked with “introduce me” and were married a year later — me in the interim still in Britain and herself in Washington DC, where in aviation circles she was very well known and mostly liked, except by those who she had exposed in her writing.
How did Joan get to that? She was an only child of Jewish parents. Her father and his brother Harry (the only one I really got to know at all) had escaped someplace in eastern Europe and got a boat to the US. She never answered questions about any of her background, except by accident. and she was not religious.
Things I did get to know. Joan ended up as president of the High School student committee (if that is what it was called) and went to Michigan and sailed through history. Her father bought her a car and she drove to California after she got a job as a US govt civil servant when passing through DC. Joan couldn’t take the boredom, sold the car and used the money to spend best part of a year in Europe. She somehow ended up going through some gate in Berlin into the commie east among other adventures that were only revealed though former college mates.
Back in DC, Joan got a junior job on an aviation magazine (became Aviation Week). The story goes that she turned up there on day one, the boss who had founded the magazine said “make me coffee”, she said “I don’t make coffee.” Boss said to lady assistant “we had better find her something to do”. And that led to her history as an eminent writer about airlines, and particularly the international politics that impacts who flies what and where, which is still the case.
She started writing about the smaller commuter carriers — and the bosses loved her. At a DC party, not yet married, I was grabbed by a couple of the bosses (mostly owners) of these small carriers, marched to meet a whole lot of them and warned with menaces not to do a single thing to harm her in any way or they would get me.
Later the bosses of the much bigger carriers — the airlines still around today — were, at the very least, highly concerned about whatever Joan was working on. It was primarily love, but also hate when she exposed something or other.
Until more recently, when the Alzheimer’s took over, Joan’s manner of speech — and directness of thought — still surprised some. All I can say is she had no idea. And in the end the illness won.
Friends are invited to gather at 3:00 p.m. Thursday, July 16, 2026, at Wilmington Funeral & Cremation, 1535 S. 41st Street, Wilmington, NC 28403 to honor Joan’s life.
